


the hardest part

by Eisoj5



Series: won't back down [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Legends: Hand of Thrawn Duology - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Canon Divergent, Gen, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 01:50:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5988028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisoj5/pseuds/Eisoj5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twice, Mara Jade's life has come crashing down around her. It's Luke Skywalker's fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the hardest part

**Author's Note:**

> Assumes the Thrawn Trilogy / Duology happened, but Jacen & Jaina don't exist. 
> 
> Warnings may change in future chapters, I haven't quite decided yet!

*****

“Come on, hurry it up,” Mara whispered to the holocron slowly unfolding in her palm. In her other hand, she held a memory crystal, ready to drop it into the holocron’s matrix once it finished opening. When the crystal had been first discovered, Luke had been uncertain whether it would work, since they were often keyed to a particular Jedi, but in every holocron they’d ever found, save two, it had activated correctly. “Some kind of Master key,” Luke had said, unable to resist, and Mara had thrown a pillow at him.

Her breath misting on the frigid air, Mara raised her head to peer out the narrow crack running lengthwise across the otherwise intact praxeum wall, scanning the expanse of tundra outside for the hundredth time since she’d come to the ruins a week earlier.

And for the hundredth time, nothing stirred. But she couldn’t shake the sense of unease that had clouded her connection to the Force ever since she landed on Arkania. What little Luke had learned of the planet from other histories and holocrons had suggested that Arkania had been firmly entrenched on the side of the Sith, long ago. Maybe it was nothing more than a lingering taint of darkness, the kind Luke said was on Dagobah, or that Leia said was at Endor, where the long or violent association with a Dark Side user stained the ground and corrupted the Force.

At least this holocron was obviously not of Sith make. For some reason, adherents to the Dark Side always stuck pretty closely to a limited color palette for lightsabers and powerful artifacts alike, and the cube in Mara’s hand glowed neither red nor black, but a pale white-green, reminiscent of the lichen covering much of the terrain outside. There were a couple of Sith holocrons locked away in Luke’s Academy on Yavin IV; she remembered their ominous, spiky appearance, and the general sense of wrongness that emanated from them. This cube—despite its age and increasingly annoying lethargy—felt _right_ in Mara’s hand.

Mara hadn’t felt comfortable trying to open the Sith holocrons, unlike some of the apprentices, who were eager to demonstrate their Force abilities—and, in at least one case, more than a little eager to learn the secrets of the Sith.

“I served under the _Emperor_ ,” Mara had reminded Luke, when he had asked if she wanted a crack at the holocrons. “I think I know everything I want to know about the Dark Side.”

He’d tilted his head at her. “You think you _could_ open them,” he’d said, easily picking up on the worries she felt just under the surface of her thoughts. “Mara, I’ve told you, I have never felt any residual dark energy in your connection to the Force.”

“I’d rather not find out that you’re wrong,” she’d replied.

“When have I ever been wrong?”

She’d opened her mouth, her mind assembling a comprehensive chronology from their history, and was about to start at the very beginning of their acquaintance, when Luke had thrown her a sardonic smile and held up his hand. “Okay, okay. But I’ve never been wrong when it comes to _you_ , Mara Jade Skywalker.”

“That’s fair,” she’d agreed, smiling.

But she still hadn’t tried to open the Sith holocrons. Eventually the novelty of them had worn off, and most of the apprentices had moved on to study other, less unsettling things. And as far as Mara knew, when she’d left on this mission for Arkania, Luke hadn’t found any way to get them open.

A flare of wintry light from her hand drew her attention back down to the cube. It was fully open, and it didn’t seem to need her crystal key, because a voice began to speak:

_"Greetings, Jedi. I am Master Arca Jeth, on the world Arkania. This was once the home of great Sith knowledge, and I came here with my students to prepare for the possibility that the Sith might return. Though we have done our best the darkness remains. Once it has touched something or someone, darkness grabs hold and never dies, although it can be subdued.”_

“I _knew_ it,” Mara growled under her breath. She reflexively peeked out again at the frozen tundra; the shorter day of Arkania was beginning to draw to a close, its sun casting a few last feeble rays onto the barren landscape.

 _“This is what I have done here,”_ Jeth’s voice continued, echoing in the praxeum ruins. _“And confident in its subjugation, some of my people have come to settle. As long as the light outweighs the darkness, life will prosper. Seek balance, Jedi. Only in this will you avert tragedy, and only in this will you truly succeed.”_

“That’s just great,” Mara muttered, as the Master finished speaking and the cube’s glow dimmed to about half light. Luke had plenty of holocrons containing philosophical musings of the old Jedi Order already, and Mara herself had another half-dozen similar finds onboard the _Jade Sabre_ , as well as a couple more holocrons from more practically-minded Masters. She fully intended to go through _those_ files more closely. Ancient history was just that, but new/old lightsaber forms were deeply fascinating to her, and it was always nice to show off something different in front of the students.

Turning the cube around and around in her hands, and studying it through the Force, though, Mara felt— _there_ —triggers to open thousands and thousands of files—at once simpler than the other holocrons she’d found, and at the same time infinitely more complex. _This is much more than Jeth’s personal journal_ , she realized.

She searched for, and found, a date embedded in the voiceprint file that had automatically activated. Sitting back on her heels, Mara let out a low whistle as she calculated the holocron’s age; it was older than any of the ones back on Yavin IV, by a couple thousand years. Judging by the number of files, its history went much, much further back than that.

Her chrono beeped; the sun had set. _Right. Time to knock off for the evening_. Through the gap in the wall, the first bright stars were starting to gleam in Arkania’s moonless dusk. Mara toggled Jeth’s holocron closed, hoping it would remember her the next time she willed it open, and tucked it into her belt pouch as she got to her feet.

Brushing millennia-old dust from her pants, she picked up the glow rod she’d set aside and gingerly picked her way across the library floor, back the way she had come, just hours before. At the doorway, she was pleased to see her rearrangement of debris had held. The thin hallway walls were starting to buckle a bit without the dirt that had held them up so long, but it had been impossible to traverse the passage without some brute Force excavation over the course of the last three days. The south-facing wall of the praxeum had collapsed long ago, and Arkania’s constant wind had blown in so much dirt that Mara had ended up deciding to climb in through the second story and work her way down to the original entrance level.

As she headed up the stairs to return to camp, Mara considered again whether there might be any interest in the Arkanian planetary government in creating a formal excavation and preservation team to study the praxeum. “You’d think they’d be keen to promote one of their cultural icons,” she’d grumbled to Leia after her sister-in-law had finished negotiating the terms of Mara’s visit and signed off the call. “Great hero of the Old Republic and all.”

“I think it’s more that they don’t care for the _New_ Republic getting involved,” Leia had said, floating her datacard across the office. Mara had snagged it from the air and added it to the stack of notes from Leia’s previous calls to the other planets she’d be visiting. “No matter how much I, or you, or Luke, might protest that you’re only doing this for the Order, they still see me as an architect of the government that wanted to restrict their, ah, _progress_.”

“Right,” Mara had said, her mouth twisting. “Progress.” During the war, she’d never been involved in the bioweapon projects of various Imperial Moffs, but rumors had always spread, especially towards the top. And there was the always-fraught issue of whether Arkania was still in the cloning business, despite heavy sanctions against the process.

Though the likelihood of Arkania developing a science of archaeology, rather than, or in addition to, genetics remained slim, Mara wondered if the government would change its mind if it turned out Jeth’s holocron contained anything on the history of their genetic work. Probably not; they were, to a fault, very future-oriented.

Which was probably why, much to Mara’s relief, no bureaucratic busybody had tried to accompany her out to the praxeum ruins. She suspected it was also that most Arkanians were bred to be well-suited to their climate-controlled cities—unless they were of the mining caste, in which case they were _excessively_ well-suited to the conditions of mines holing the planet from one pole to the other. Spending days on end in some ancient ruin exposed to the wind and freezing cold probably didn’t mesh well with the city-dwellers’ refined sensibilities.

In what had once been the praxeum’s dorm rooms, Mara heated up some of Luke’s favorite hot chocolate on her camp stove, and settled down on her bedroll to log the day’s work. It was the sort of thing she would have delegated to an apprentice, had one volunteered, or been assigned to join her. But they had picked up on her distaste for shepherding fledgling Jedi through the ins and outs of archaeological missions—in that she had said as much, very firmly, after the disaster in Coruscant’s undercity. It had taken a month to get the smell out of her hair.

 _Finished clearing the hallway on the lower level_ , Mara wrote. _Conducted scan of the library and documented the remaining artifacts._ She’d come prepared with special storage for scrolls and books; they’d thought the cold, arid climate of Arkania would be perfect for paper preservation. But nearly everything Jeth or his people had kept on flimsies had either been shredded by wind or vermin. The datapads weren’t much better off. She’d managed to power one on despite its shattered screen, only to find it had been wiped of everything except the factory settings.

 _Located a secret compartment at the base of the shelves where the holocron was stored_. Mara was more than a little well-versed in the art of hiding spots, but she’ happened on this one almost by accident—okay, probably through the Force—when she’d kicked a rock loose and it thudded hollowly against the wall. Libraries were easy; the trigger was always something nearby on a shelf, or a button on the desk of the librarian. It had been the work of mere moments to find the trick to getting the compartment open.

Her scanner fed measurement data into her pad as she worked, and when it was done, the pad projected a holo rendering of the library. Mara checked it over for errors, or anything she’d missed and should look for in the morning; no other secret compartments showed up other than the one where Jeth’s holocron had been hidden.

_Heading back to Novania spaceport in the morning and then home._

With a satisfied sigh, Mara shut down her datapad, and after puttering around a little while longer to pack up, she slid into her bedroll and went to sleep.

*****

_The black-clad man stood with his back to her, gripping a brilliant red lightsaber in his hand, the pouring rain hissing off of the crackling, unstable blade. Arranged in a loose military formation behind him were a few others—no one Mara recognized, but all with the same terrible purpose in mind._

_And facing the dark figure: her husband, his own brilliant green-white blade a beacon in the darkness, his face blurred with rain and tears._

_Standing alone, in the field of corpses._

_The dark Jedi strode towards Luke, igniting the cross-guard of his lightsaber—_

And with a jerk that nearly had her falling out of her bedroll, Mara snapped out of the dream.

She sat up, shaking, and tried to catch her breath, overwhelmed by the grief and despair that she had seen in Luke’s eyes. Her immediate, reflexive thought was that it was just a dream, but it was too much like the dreams she had once had, after the death of the Emperor.

Only this wasn’t the dying order of a Sith Lord reaching out across the galaxy to find her.

It was a vision of the future. The kind that _would_ come to pass.

_If it hadn’t already._

Panicked, her heart full of dread, Mara reached out with the Force—and the wrongness she had sensed all along was _there_ , like a flame whipped into a raging inferno, a tearing wound ripping the Force apart. It was a desperate, wordless scream from two dozen minds—and then, to her horror, one by one, the screams fell silent, until only one bright spot remained, his anguish flooding the currents of the Force.

Mara knew that mind nearly as well as she knew her own.

 _Luke!_ she called out, hoping against hope their bond would carry her thoughts to him. _Luke!_

There was no answer.

 _He’s not dead_. _I would have felt it_ , she tried to reason with herself. _He’s alive. He’s alive._

But their students—all those promising young Jedi—were not.

And Mara knew, with a certainty that froze her heart, who had killed them.

*****

Mara had always prided herself on keeping a cool head even in the worst of situations. It was born of a warped kind of training, to be sure, but it had served her well in both her career as a smuggler and as a respectable Jedi.

First things first: get off Arkania.

Mara ignored the part of her mind that screamed to _just leave everything_ _and_ _go_ , and instead did a thorough, precise job of packing up her gear. She strode quickly back through the upper level of the praxeum to where she’d climbed in through the broken window frame a week earlier, and checked the rope she’d left tied there. It wasn’t far to fall, and was the sort of thing Luke, or the apprentices—she winced at that, imagining the vision of their bodies in the mud—would probably just jump, trusting in the Force to land safely, but Mara, for all her decade-plus years as a Jedi, still preferred to rely on her other, non-mystical tools.

She grabbed the rope and steadily rappelled down the praxeum wall. At the bottom, she reached out with the Force to untie the rope, and it slithered neatly into a coil she slung over her shoulder. A few meters away, the camouflage net over her rented landspeeder had mostly held its own against the wind; only one corner had ripped away from its stake and flapped, as if beckoning her.

Her ride back to Novania was a blur. The tundra stretched out for kilometers in every direction, and the speeder’s navcomputer handled the piloting, giving her time to plan, and too much time to think.

Despite Luke’s usually correct visions of the future, Mara had yet to experience a Force vision of past or future events that were even half as straightforward. The dream of the Emperor’s death had been wrong for so long that she still sought independent confirmation of the things she saw, on the rare occasions she was granted those glimpses. But though she desperately wanted this vision to be deceiving, she knew that Luke could only confirm it.

If she would ever get to see Luke again.

Luke had confided his private fears about teaching to Mara, that night so long ago on Wayland. He’d worried about whether he could ever actually train anyone; had spoken about how Obi-Wan Kenobi had tried to train Anakin Skywalker, and ultimately lost him to the dark side. And later, after they had become friends, though not yet lovers, they had talked about how the few surviving Jedi from the Emperor’s rise to power had fled into exile, Mara frank in her explanations of how she, and others like her, or like his father, had pursued them.

In Luke’s musings about the Jedi that had fled, Mara had heard no rebuke, no criticism of Yoda and Obi-Wan’s choice to retreat from the galaxy that had once heralded them, only understanding and dread.

And now, despite all the people that loved him and would want him to stay, Luke would—

No, Luke wouldn’t _hide,_ she thought. Luke would do what he had always done: he would search out someone, or something, to show him how to make things right. But though he might hope for Mara to join him, she knew Luke would expect nothing less than for her to seek out her own path. As she always had before.

And maybe, someday, they would come back together again.

She closed her eyes against the bleakness of the land and sky and her heart, and thought about what she knew of Ben Organa Solo’s obsession with Darth Vader.

**Author's Note:**

> Been sitting on this for almost a month and figured I might as well get the first chapter posted. Thanks to wewillnotbow on tumblr for reading it over and talking through some (future) parts with me!


End file.
